1.5.13

INCUBATE THIS!

(Published in Johns Hopkins Engineering Magazine)

INCUBATE THIS!

How great ideas are making it to market, thanks to an enterprising new breed of engineers.By Mat Edelson

Sitting alone in her incubator, Karin Hwang looks and sounds
incredibly grown up for her age. It’s a little after 10 a.m. on a brisk
Wednesday morning. Late by normal natal standards, but the half-dozen baby
businesses that are taking their first steps here, in offices dotting the third
floor of Baltimore’s old Eastern High School, are just waking up to the day.

Such is life in the Emerging Technology Center at Johns Hopkins Eastern, which
seems intent on nurturing its newbies, right down to the “Go ’n Grow” cubical
suite for those cash-poor start-ups fresh out of the womb. As Hwang makes her
way past the darkened offices and enters her office-cum-lab, B309, two things mark her immediately as a member of
Generation Tech: A case of Coke sitting atop a donated mini-fridge and two
well-used couches--heavy fuel for the mission-driven and a soft landing place
in the wee hours for the mission-exhausted.

And yet, the fact that Hwang’s even on this mission, at this
relatively tender age, speaks volumes about a sea change in academia. In the
middle of a desk filled with an engineer’s knick-knacks—a wire here, a plastic
mold there—Hwang’s holding her future (and perhaps the future of accurately
testing for the onset of labor) in the palm of her hand. CervoCheck, the tiny, three-legged
piece of rubbery silicon, hardly seems revolutionary—but then again, the wheel
wasn’t probably all that impressive at first to those who hadn’t seen it
before.

Not that long ago, the only way Karin Hwang would have gotten
this close to a piece of emerging technology seeking a market would have been
deep in the lab of a conglomerate that would have owned her work lock, stock,
and all the free tea and soda they could pour down her gullet. Given the
traditional, fundamental engineering curricula Hwang would have been exposed to
just a few years ago, the biomedical engineer wouldn’t even have known what to
do with such a medical device, other than perhaps perfect its physical
properties.

The potential game-changer Hwang is holding is anything but a
gift from some corporate taskmaster. While still a student at Hopkins last
year—indeed, as the core part of her master’s program in Bioengineering Innovation and Design—Hwang and three fellow engineers
were responsible for identifying the need such a device could fill, designing
said contraption, and determining its patentability, market, and business
viability.Nothing was left to guess work, as a unique curriculum
guaranteed that Hwang would receive as much exposure to entrepreneurship and
business as she did to beefing up her biomedical engineering chops.

And when the program was said and done, Hwang wasn’t. Along with classmate Sung Jin "Nate" Sunwoo, she set up shop, began negotiating a licensing agreement with
Hopkins, found a few sheep for testing the device, and set about on the
wondrous process of taking an engineering idea that had come in part from her
mind and bringing it to a place where it could safely be placed in the human
body.

At 23, she also created a business card with the appropriate
business title:

CEO.

***

Throughout the Whiting School, engineering students are being
exposed to the culture of business in ways that would have been unthinkable in
the days when their veteran professors attended university—a time when
“knowledge for knowledge’s sake” ruled the day.

No more. Today programs are being established to ensure that
those who want to apply their engineering skills to real-world problems will
have, as any engineer can appreciate, the right business, management, and
financial tools in their toolbox.

Many are offered through the Whiting School's Center for
Leadership Education (CLE). Notably, CLE offers undergraduate engineers an
Entrepreneurship & Management (E&M) minor including classes in accounting, professional communications, and leadership and organizational Behavior. The
CLE program is headed by Tim Weihs, Ph.D., a professor of material science and engineering who is also an entrepreneur, having patented and developed
reactive foil technology.

Weihs believes that exposing engineering students to business
concepts--indeed creating entrepreneurially-minded engineering graduates and a
campus-wide movement to take technology from research papers to applied, useful
products--is very important, even if it means some adjustment from
traditionally research-driven educational models.

“I think in an engineering school there’s room for both
(research and business exposure) and, frankly, if you don’t have both you are less
competitive. My basic argument is that engineering schools should deliver three
‘products.’ Students are your top product. Knowledge is number two. And a close
number three should be technology development. Instead of just handing
knowledge over the fence, you also want to be creating technologies and
transferring them to the world to make it a better place.”

Weihs notes that a related tech transfer/entrepreneurial push is
occurring in the two-year-old Masters of Science in Engineering Management
(MSEM) program. That degree pairs a concentration in one of 13 engineering specialties
with five business courses covering multiple topics from finance and management
to intellectual property and venture planning, all within Whiting’s CLE. The MSEM is, in part, an outgrowth of the hugely popular E
& M (Entrepreneurship & Management) minor, which is essentially the same
financial inculcation experienced by students in the Center for Bioengineering
Innovation & Design (CBID) masters program.

Similar exposure to the potential of commercialization is taking
place up at the Institute of NanoBioTechnology. The Institute has created
a summer seminar for doctoral students that
brings in venture capitalists, tech transfer experts, and corporate leaders as
a way of balancing what is, by its very nature, an intensive research
experience.

“We think it’s quite important that students know that there are options open to them other than academic careers or careers in an R&D
lab; i.e., there are possibilities for joining a start-up company or
potentially even starting their own company, commercializing what they’re doing
in the lab,” says Peter Searson, director of the institute and a professor of materials science and engineering.

Across the board, these program directors say there’s a certain
kind of mindset that’s growing among their students. “The students who come [to
our program] are the kinds of students who really want to have an impact on the
world,” says Youseph Yazdi, PhD., executive director of CBID and the David E. Swirnow Master of Science in Bioengineering Innovation and Design program.

CBID’s yearlong
master’s program places
students like Karin Hwang into three months of rotations at various Johns
Hopkins Hospital units. There, working side-by-side with clinicians, surgeons,
and nurses, they analyze literally hundreds of systems, devices…anything that
catches their eye as a potential problem to solve. These myriad possibilities
are boiled down to three team projects that by year’s end will yield
prototypes, and more importantly, proto-minds capable of understanding the
stress loads that can fracture a medical device or their investor’s bottom
line.

For Hwang and her team, their interest was piqued by the fact that
devices for sensing when a woman was going into premature labor were both
primitive in design (a belt worn around the waist to mechanically detect
uterine contractions, a notoriously poor design for obese women) and
antiquated (nothing new had come on the market in almost 30 years).

Knowing the
precise stage of labor is vital to physicians who are trying to bring a baby to
term; Hwang’s team had struck upon the idea that a device that analyzed
electrical signals directly from the cervix could be far more accurate and
popular for use among OB/GYN’s.

“We make the commitment to our CBID students that they will work
on projects with both significant clinical impact and highcommercial
potential,” says Yazdi, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering
who also holds an MBA. “It may not be something that gets you a Nobel Prize in
Physics, and it may not always be cutting edge in terms of technology, but it will be cutting edge in terms of
impacting people.”

***

If Karin Hwang is fortunate, she’ll end up like Matt Daimler.
Daimler is the poster child for all an entrepreneurial-minded Whiting engineer
grad is supposed to be.

A computer science engineer, Daimler was one of the first
engineers to graduate with an E & M minor in 1999. To say he set the bar
high for all who followed would be an understatement. Shortly after graduating,
Daimler was flopping around his coach seat on a 12-hour flight to the Czech
Republic, desperately trying to get comfortable. Diagonally across from him was
a man who managed to snag a spot with no seat in front of him; that lucky
traveler pulled down a sleeping bag, created an ersatz ottoman for his legs,
and promptly passed out. Daimler, who was making regular business trips to
Prague, memorized that seat number and swore he’d book it next time around.
Only thing, there was no easy way to
book it. At least, not until Daimler put his mind and programming skills to the
task.

Five years later, with his wife, Susan Damelin Daimler (A&S '99), he launched SeatGuru.com. The Internet portal that showed
each airline’s airplane seat configurations was written up by Time magazine as one of the “50 Coolest
Web Sites” of 2006, and a year after that Daimler sold the company to a
division of Expedia. The sales price remains confidential (“In our actual
contract documents for the sale, I had to get a provision allowing me to tell
my parents that I’d sold SeatGuru,” laughs Daimler, “and if my parents leaked
the sale, I was on the hook for that leak”), but he admits he did “really
well,” crediting his Whiting School education for “helping me in every stage of
my career.”

“To go into a program where you learn a touch of business, a
touch of law, a touch of marketing, it makes you dangerous when you get to your
first job, your next job…it really does help you when you get out there in the
real world. I think that’s what everyone on campus realized, that this was the
kind of a ‘life/job’ minor you could use throughout your career,” says Daimler.

******

For universities like Hopkins, the pressure to shift the
traditional academic model away from strictly basic or foundational work was
three-pronged, with the first two big knocks coming from outside the Whiting
School’s doors. The groundwork was laid some 30 years ago when The Feds—through
the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 (a.k.a. the University Small Business Patent
Procedures Act)—allowed universities to patent their research. The most astute
university administrators understood Uncle
Sam's message between the lines: “We’ll fund your work…but you’ll need to have something useful to show the
public for our dime.”

As an example, that National Institutes of Health, which drops more
than $600 million in research money in Hopkins’ coffers annually, has over time
pushed more and more monies toward translational research aimed at yielding
concrete drugs, devices, and other clinical benefits for patients.

At first, the response among academics was deep grumbles. Few
had licensed their own research efforts; even fewer had developed them into
successful businesses that students could emulate.

This changed at Hopkins as tech transfer offices became a campus
staple, with ad hoc attempts on various campuses crystallizing at Hopkins with
the creation of the Johns Hopkins Technology Transfer office in 2001. John Fini, director of Intellectual Property & Technology
Commercialization for the Homewood Campus, who interacts with the university’s tech transfer
office on a daily basis, notes the School of Engineering now has some 360
patents from engineering professors in its portfolio, and some have opted to
create their own start-ups.

This has had a trickle down effect on students. Laura Ensign, a
doctoral researcher at INBT, notes that her principal investigator has his own pharmaceutical
start-up, while another engineering advisor has a company developing a gel to
prevent HIV infection. “My thinking [about business] has evolved. At first I
was all about the research, but as we’ve gone along it’s now about ‘what’s the
application?’ Which I think makes it more exciting, the translational aspects,”
says Ensign. “Plus, coming in, I hadn’t known about IP [intellectual property]
and how you could take things we were doing at the bench and turn it into a
product. I’ve been on a couple of patents with my PI that have gotten sold.”

Industry needs also fueled the change, as firms weighed in that
they wanted engineering grads who could solve more than a calculus problem.
“The whole E & M minor started because professors, notably John Wierman,
kept hearing from potential employers: ‘Your kids need to know some business
basics. I can’t even discuss a balance sheet and income statement with them,’”
says Lawrence Aronhime, a senior lecturer who teaches Intro to Business,
Financial Accounting, and Entrepreneurship to undergraduates. Aronhime
also organizes CBID’s business curriculum and teaches Venture Planning in the
MSEM program out of Whiting’s Center for Leadership Education, where he’s the associate director.

To Aronhime, a solid grounding in business matters is just as
important to an engineer’s long-term success as technical proficiency. “The
technical competency gets you in the door and starts you up the promotion
line,” he says. “But at the end of the day, senior managers [in engineering and
tech firms] start to slowly shift as they go up that line, toward a business
competence and focus.”

And that’s a competency to which 21st-century
engineering students are demanding they have access. Ultimately, at any
institution, the consumer rules, and today’s student consumers are coming of age
at a time when some of the most successful engineer-cum-entrepreneurs (hello,
Mark Zuckerberg!) look exactly like they do, right down to the scraggly clothes
and unlined faces.

“There’s a feeling, an expectation that you’re supposed to do
something bigger. That’s the burden of our generation, that you’re not supposed
to be just an expert in one thing or just stay in a narrow niche,” says
27-year-old Laura Ensign. “I have a lot of friends I went to engineering school
with who are very entrepreneurially-minded. That’s their passion. I feel like
I’d be selling myself short if I just got an industry research position in a
lab for the rest of my life. I’d be cutting off my potential.”

Ensign’s philosophy is music to the ears of Phil Green '58, the School of Engineering alumnus who was a pioneer in medical robotics. Green sits on the
School's Technology and Commercialization Advisory Board, a nationwide group of
40 successful tech-minded alumni chaired by Phil Garfinkle, P '10, '13, a former key player
in Kodak’s Chief Technology Office who created and sold several tech-oriented start-ups.

Phil Green’s main role is to find venture capital for potential
Whiting School start-ups, but he also sees a direct pipeline back to Hopkins in
the offing, with each new venture serving as both a thought catalyst and
employment opportunity for business-minded engineering graduates. “[These new
ventures will] help school Hopkins grads in the idea that ‘you can do this,
it’s available to you, and it’s exciting.’”

Indeed, some area ventures are showing signs of just such a
pipeline. Engineers John Trupiano, BS/MS '06, and Yair Flicker, BS/MS '06, both of whom took extensive
CLE business coursework (Flicker graduated with an E&M minor) started SmartLogic
Solutions web consulting five years ago; they’ve already grown their start-up
to eight employees, including, since their start, three Hopkins engineering
grads. Similarly, T. Rowe Price has, through 2010, annually chosen at least one
Hopkins engineering senior for its extremely competitive two-year investment
fellows program (see sidebar). The program combines the ability to create
complex mathematical trending models with the management and communication
skills necessary in the financial world. Vice President Sean Jones, who directs the
fellowship, is blunt about the advantage Whiting School grads have.

“We’re looking for people with strong analytical skills, but who
don’t just want to sit in a lab. They need to get out, talk to people, and dig
into problems. What distinguishes people in the program…is going beyond the
basics of what’s asked of you. Can you run with the problem, go find solutions,
do research on your own, pull things together and do the analysis without a
huge amount of guidance?” says Jones. “So those with entrepreneurial skills,
those who are creative, driven--those do well in this program, and we get a lot
of them from Hopkins.”

Karin Hwang is optimistic that one day, funding and providence willing,
she’ll be able to employ future CBID grads as well. Nate Sunwoo, her partner in CervoCheck, was a fellow CBID’er, and Hwang says she hopes one day
they’ll be plenty of room at the incubator for a few new old friends.

“We’re
always looking at Hopkins folks for potential internships or to later on add to
our team. Especially those people from our program who have our skill set. I
can see in the future us becoming a pipe line,” Hwang says.

As they say in both business and engineering…it’s all about the
flow.

#####

SIDEBAR-FROM MIND TO MATTER

For senior material sciences major Laura Veldhuis, business and
innovation has long been part of her game. In high school, she was on a team
that received a $6,000 grant from MIT as part of a design contest; their
resulting prototype—a device that, deriving its power from a moving bicycle,
recharged USB-connectible electronics—thrilled the assembled crowd in Cambridge.
At Homewood, despite her heavy course load, through the CLE's Hopkins Student Enterprises program, she ran a cake and care package delivery service for two years, arranging
everything from storage of the delectables to marketing the service to parents nationwide.

Learning experiences for sure, but nothing compared to her
present position interning in Whiting’s Office of Technology Transfer’s
Intellectual Property department. Each day she delves into the underbelly of
nearly every lab associated with the Whiting School, sifting through research
papers that could lead to commercialized products. She is awed by what
she encounters.

“I feel like everybody would be so excited if they could see all
the things I read, all the provisional patents we have. The things people are
working on are so interesting--crazy stuff that almost sounds like science
fiction and interesting medical devices,” says Veldhuis.

For Veldhuis, the internship is the actualization of both her
own interests and lessons learned as part of her E & M minor. Several of
her professors, including Tim Weihs and Howard Katz, have either worked in
industry or have their own companies. They spoke freely of their delight in
going from bench to market, taking their work and shaping it into products that
benefit the public. Veldhuis uses the word “phenomenal” to describe her
Business Law classes (“Great profs who really knew their stuff!”) but saves
favorite class status for senior lecturer Lawrence Aronhime’s Entrepreneurship
course.

“Every single week we had to come up with a new idea and
different frameworks for how to develop that idea. It was a good time, perfect
for people like me who like to play around with ideas,” she says.

With graduation just around the corner, Veldhuis, who is working
on transparent conductive oxides in Katz’s lab (think of the glass screen on an
i-Phone, and you’ve got one such example), says her melding of business with
engineering has her considering numerous options. Consulting, venture capital,
patent law, perhaps continuing on with an MSEM…one thing she knows is that, in
her mind, basic and applied engineering are forever intertwined.

“I think there’s a revolving door for engineers, where you work
in industry for a bit, come back to academia and get a master’s or PhD, then
flow back and forth,” says Veldhuis. “It’s a nice way to keep ideas fresh.”

***

SIDEBAR-MODEL EMPLOYEE…BY M. Edelson

When John Creizis, '07, was a kid, it didn’t matter whether it was electric pencil
sharpeners or the stock market: if something could be broken down and analyzed, he was all over it.

Raised in Evanston,
IL, Criezis was a youngster ahead of his time, right down to the childhood
stock portfolio he began managing at the age of 12. On those occasions when his
stocks tanked, Criezis wasn’t discouraged. Instead, he says, “I saw it as a
challenge to get better, to better understand what I was investing in, so that
if a stock went wrong, I wanted it to happen because of something I saw as a
risk, not something that I didn’t expect.”

Flash forward a dozen years, and Criezis, now 26, is doing the
same thing at T. Rowe Price, where he’s currently analyzing stocks with Price’s
International Equities Team. The full-time job is his latest stop on a
whirlwind tour of the world of finance, courtesy of a two-year Investment
Fellowship funded by T. Rowe Price, that Criezis was began upon graduation from the Whiting School. The global investment firm, which usually offers four such fellowships each year, specifically targets
engineers or those with engineering-like skills. “As the
finance industry has evolved, math, computer science, and engineering people
have an advantage (as) the analytics have become more advanced,” says Criezis.
“Everything has become more mathematically based.”

Prior to his current posting at Price, Criezis went through the
equivalent of financial boot camp, with six-month intensive exposures in four
different departments at T. Rowe Price: Asset Allocation, Equity Trading,
Quantitative Fixed Income, and Risk Management. Though called a fellowship, the
program is in fact a full-time appointment with commensurate pay to other
entry-level positions in the field. As part of his duties, Criezis analyzed
numerous models for predicting success and failure, and created his own models
for simulations. Of his work now on International Equities, he notes, “I’m
using a lot of the quantitative tools I helped build while I was working in the
fellowship program.”

Criezis, who completed the E &M minor while a student at the
Whiting School, enjoys the opportunity to intermingle finance and engineering. He finds it gives him an edge up, especially when, as part of analyzing a stock, he meets with senior
management from high-tech companies.

“Just this morning, I was on a call with a
company that makes very specialized equipment for the semiconductor industry.
If I wasn’t an engineer, I probably wouldn’t understand how these chips are
made…if you really understand product differentiation, you can [tell] whether
they have an advantage against a competitor, versus just trying to sell a puff
of smoke.”

About Me

As a famous TV shrink once noted, the key to a full life is "A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants." I take my work, my writing, seriously. Me? Not so much. After 30 years in the journalism game, I'm using this blog to step out from behind the third-person curtain. Opinion, essay, informed reportage...I can't guarantee what you'll see from day-to-day, but I promise I'll give it an honest turn and a unique take. Let me know whatcha think.
Thanks, as always, for your time and consideration,
Mat